Now You See It (21 page)

She tossed it onto the chair.

But, of course, I can no longer say
she
.

For it was Brian Crane who stood before my son, his voice hoarse with anger as he snarled,
“Up yours, Max.”

With that, he strode into the entry hall, slamming the door behind him.

Then there was one.

Multiple questions crowded my mind, pounding for attention.

All quickly reduced to one, however.

Why had it all been done?

What was behind it?

It was maddening to me that Max did not come over to me and explain. I was there because he wanted me present, that was clear. But for what reason? He didn’t explain the situation to me. What conceivable purpose could there have been in my being present throughout the entire mad charade?

Yet Max did not explain.

He didn’t even look at me.

Instead, he stared at the door to the entry hall, his face impassive.

Leaving me immersed in drowning questions, none of them answerable.

After a while, he pushed slowly to his feet and trudged to the fireplace, his movements those of a man who more than felt his age and despair. Despite the agitation of confusion in my mind, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sorrow for his obvious distress.

He stood before the portrait of his long-dead wife.

The illumination in the room was so gloomy now that he switched on the light above the portrait.

The soft glow was cast down over Adelaide Delacorte’s exquisite face.

Max stared at it, his expression one of suffering.

“It isn’t true,” he said. “I always loved you, Adelaide.
Always.”

He drew in a trembling breath.

“I didn’t know you were too ill to work that night,” he told her. “I should have, but you know how I always am before a show, aware of nothing but the performance I’m about to give.”

True
, I could not help thinking.

Max twitched as a peal of thunder sounded. His face was whitened momentarily by a flash of lightning.

“Please,” he said, “believe me. You should have
told
me. I would never have asked you to work if I’d had any idea
how ill you were. You know that’s true. Curse me for an oblivious fool, but it was an accident. An
accident
. I
swear
it.”

He was unable to restrain a sob.

“Adelaide,” he murmured. “Please. Forgive me.”

He leaned against the fireplace for several minutes, lost in the agony of his remembrance and his guilt.

Then he straightened, teeth clenched, and switched off the light above the portrait.

Stepping over a pace, he reached up to one of the fireplace stones the Sheriff had examined visually, even touched.

He began to push on the stone.

Then he drew back his hand and turned to me.

He regarded me for several moments before walking over.

“It isn’t right that you should see this,
Padre,”
he said. “I’ve shocked you enough.”

He began to push my wheelchair toward the entry hall.

My God
, I thought,
after all this, are you going to withhold the goddam punch line?

I wonder if I made a noise of protest, some faint sound which indicated the angry frustration I felt.

I’ll never know.

All I do know is that Max stopped pushing me and gazed down at me, obviously thinking.

Tell me what is going on!
pleaded my mind.

Did he pick up the plea telepathically? Who knows.

But he did change his mind.

“No,” he said. “Shock or no shock, you have a right to know what’s going on. It’s only just, considering everything.”

Was that a
smile?
It was extremely faint, and yet I could have sworn …

“Besides,” he said, “I really want you to see the effect.”

He turned my wheelchair toward the picture window.

Son
, I thought,
aren’t you going to tell me why you wanted Sheriff Plum to think that Brian was Cassandra?

Not so. He left me sitting there as he returned to the fireplace. To that particular stone.

Which he pushed in all the way now.

I felt myself tighten (or did I?) as I heard a sound of machinery by the window overlooking the lake.

My God
, I thought.
Blast my unseeing eyes. I’ve been a blind old fool. Taken in! And me
The Great Delacorte
before he was!

Houdini performed the trick with much success. He called it
The Country Girl
.

It involved the impossible disappearance of a small girl sitting at a table near a window.

In Max’s version of the effect, what appeared to be a window view of the gazebo by the lake wasn’t that at all.

It was, in fact, a reflected view, created by double-sided mirrors in an addition built onto TMR.

For now, as the apparatus functioned, the view was altering, the gazebo and the lake disappearing from sight.

To be replaced by a freezer area approximately four feet wide and three feet deep, its height that of the window.

Inside the freezer area, suspended from a rope around her chest, was Cassandra Delacorte.

Her features stiff and white in death.

It was, of course, coincidence that, precisely at the moment Cassandra’s corpse appeared to me, a roar of thunder cannonaded in the sky and lightning turned the awful sight into a tableau of blinding whiteness.

Max was unable to resist toasting the sky.

“Good timing!” he cried.

Outside, a torrent of rain began to fall, so heavy that it was, immediately, a curtain of descending water.

Max regarded the corpse of his wife.

There was no sense of triumph or of pleasure in his look.

“So,” he said. “It worked.”

It did not require the intellect of a Rhodes scholar to know what he meant.

With the help of Brian’s talent at impersonating his sister, they had successfully fooled Harry.

And, more important, the Sheriff.

With all the tricks and counter-tricks occurring, Plum completely missed the main illusion of them all. (I missed it, too.)

The person he’d assumed to be Cassandra Delacorte wasn’t her at all.

Max drained his glass of brandy and set down the glass.

He returned to me and placed a hand on my shoulder.

I know I shuddered then, for he felt it.

“I’m sorry, Father,” he said. “Don’t think I’m unaware of what I’ve done. I know that I’ve committed murder. Perhaps the motivation wasn’t strong enough.”

His voice hardened.

“I thought it
was
, though,” he said.

He exhaled heavily.

“Now the final phase begins,” he told me.

“The conclusion of the trick.

“I’ll continue with the act. Not in Las Vegas, but in various other locations, jobs I’ll arrange for myself. Las Vegas is too conspicuous. But lesser whereabouts will be in order.

“Where Brian’s continued imitation of his sister will go unnoticed.

“The falling-out with Harry was, of course, essential.

“If Harry was around, he’d inevitably see through the pretense.

“Now he won’t.”

“And,”
he went on, “Sheriff Plum ‘keeping an eye’ on me is equally essential.

“His value consists of the fact that he will,
at the same time
, be keeping an eye on the person he believes to be Cassandra, a witness to her ongoing existence.”

And I thought he’d lost focus
, the chilling idea came. How wrong I’d been. The discovery did nothing but dismay me further.

Did I wince as my son chuckled? I wanted to.

“Brother Brian’s going to be a busy boy from now on,” he said. “His ‘gofer’ days are over.” He rubbed his eyes; he must have felt drained. “A busy boy, but not a happy one,” he said.

He knelt beside my wheelchair.

“Not that he deserves to be happy,” he said. “He has a lot of paying back to do for all those forged checks.”

So that’s it
, I thought.
That’s his hold on Brian
.

Max hissed scornfully.

“He was never very bright, was he?” he said.

“You know what I have in my safe,
Padre?
A contract signed by Brian.

“An agreement to assist me in the killing of his sister.”

I closed my eyes to shut it all away. I couldn’t bear these dreadful moments.

Max didn’t notice.

“I had to insist on it, of course,” he said.

He made a sound of dark amusement.

“After all,” he went on, “could I trust the word of a man who’d help murder his own sister?”

Oh, God, Max, God
. I wanted to weep.

Max made an odd sound, and I opened my eyes to look at him

He was blinking his eyes. He closed them hard, then opened them again.

“I should have eaten something today,” he said. “That much brandy on an empty stomach isn’t good. But then, I have no appetite for food.

“Only for revenge,”
he finished.

Now he saw the look on my face; I guess I wasn’t totally without expression.

“I know you think it was horrific what I did. It
is
. I
admit
it.

“But you never had this kind of motivation in your life.

“This kind of betrayal.”

His right hand jerked up as though he meant to strike Cassandra, even dead.

“You don’t know what she did to me,” he said.

“Made me think that it was because of illness that my eyesight was failing, my hearing failing, my hand dexterity failing, my ability to concentrate on stage failing.

“Even my ability to perform in bed,”
he finished in a low, venom-ridden voice.

His breath was quickening, his teeth on edge.

“Illness,” he said. “That’s what she had me believing.

“When all the time it was her.

“Slowly poisoning me.”

I stared at him in sickened dread. Not that he could see it, but I felt it.

Poisoning
him?

Max shuddered with rage.

“She thought she could do it indefinitely,” he said. “That I’d never find out.